Customer Reviews – Are Manufacturers the Next Frontier?

Enabling customers to rate and review products has worked wonders for leading Internet retailers. Amazon and eBay were two pioneers of this practice, and in the technology world U.S. retailers such as CompUSA have been getting on the bandwagon. (They need to, or else risk losing sales to online retailers who link to review sites.)

Search marketing expert Mike Moran’s Biznology blog does a great job of explaining the reasons for this practice, but more interestingly points out the potential for a new source of online customer reviews, coming this time from manufacturers.

Mike applauds the move by Sun Microsystems to incorporate customer reviews for all of Sun’s products on sun.com, and hopes that other manufacturers will follow suit. I agree with some of Mike’s reasoning, mostly from the standpoint of building goodwill and a greater sense community among customers.

I see two potential pitfalls of this system for manufacturers. First is whether a manufacturer can successfully encourage an open and thriving review community, if it can delete the reviews it doesn’t like. What if they mention a competitor more favorably? On the flip side, how do you prevent competitors (or competitors’ fans) from subverting the manufacturer’s good intentions?

The second issue I see is the potential for reviews and other value-added features on manufacturers’ web sites to draw customers away from resellers and cause further channel conflict.  If online retailers offer customer reviews to prevent an end-run by e-tailers on editorial review sites, what’s to prevent a manufacturer from offering reviews to bring in more direct sales revenue at the expense of its partners?

To succeed, a manufacturer will have to foster an open community and be an advocate for its channel partners. It’s a tall order, but I believe it can be done if manufacturers are committed enough. If it works, customers will have one more source of information to consider when purchasing and that’s a good thing. Good luck, Sun. We’ll be watching.

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